The title may smack of an Erica Jong novel, but this is a biography of the courageous and tender woman best remembered as mother of 19th-century novelist Anthony Trollope. Fanny Trollope herself was a bestselling author of six travel books and 35 novels. She was a contemporary of Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, and Robert and Elizabeth Browning, among others. She wrote for money, according to Neville-Sington, because her husband’s failing efforts at law and agriculture cast her as the breadwinner of the family. Born in 1779, Fanny didn—t marry until she was 29; she had six children within the next nine years. When her son Arthur and her father died within months of each other, and her marriage began unraveling from the impact of her husband’s erratic and angry moods, Fanny packed up three children and set off for America, where she experimented with a series of businesses, including a wax works. Returning to England, she wrote a book about her experiences (Domestic Manners of the Americans, for a recent edition of which Neville- Sington has written an introduction), her first bestseller. For the next decade, she struggled against debt and more tragedy: a son, her husband, and her younger daughter died in rapid succession. Still, she continued to turn out increasingly popular novels and travel books, waking before dawn to write. Her fiction included both novels of manners and attacks against social ills (slavery, child labor). Critics considered her sharp and funny (—her vulgarity is sublime,— wrote one). Sons Tom and Anthony both became writers, with Anthony, of course, surpassing his mother in reputation. Fanny died in Italy at 84, her last book published only a few years earlier. The author borrows heavily from both Fanny and Anthony’s novels to flesh out the contours of their lives. Fanny’s humor, warmth, and adventurous spirit are evident in all her writing, be it fiction or a thank-you note. (illustrations and photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Nov. 30, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-85905-2
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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